Recent Forum Topics › Forums › The Public House › Chris Hedges: Nation of the Walking Dead
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Billy_T.
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April 4, 2017 at 8:17 pm #66972
wvParticipantlink:http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_nation_of_the_walking_dead_20170402
Opioids and experiences that simulate the deadening effects of narcotics are mechanisms to keep us submissive and depoliticized. Desperate citizens in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel “Brave New World” ingested the pleasure drug soma to check out of reality. Our own versions of soma allow tens of millions of Americans to retreat daily into addictive mousetraps that generate a self-induced autism.
The United States consumes 80 percent of opioids used worldwide, and more than 33,000 died in this country in 2015 from opioid overdoses. There are 300 million prescriptions written and $24 billion spent annually in the U.S. for painkillers. Americans supplement this mostly legal addiction with over $100 billion a year in illicit marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin. And nearly 14 million U.S. adults, one in every 13, regularly abuse alcohol.
But these monetary figures are far less than what we spend on gambling. Americans in 2013 lost $119 billion gambling, with an additional $70 billion—or $300 for every adult in the country—spent on lottery tickets.
Federal and state governments, reliant on tax revenues from legal gambling and on lottery ticket sales, will do nothing to halt the expansion of the industry or the economic and psychological toll it exacts on those in financial distress. State-run lottery games had sales of $73.9 billion in 2015, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries. This revenue is vital to budgets beset by declining incomes, deindustrialization and austerity. “State lotteries provided more revenue than state corporate-income taxes in 11 of the 43 states where they were legal, including Delaware, Rhode Island, and South Dakota,” Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic. “The poorest third of households buy half of all lotto tickets,” he noted. Gambling is a stealth tax on poor people hoping to beat the nearly impossible odds. Governmental income from gambling is an effort to make up for the taxes the rich and corporations no longer pay. …see link
April 4, 2017 at 9:49 pm #66976wvParticipantWolff on Marx:
April 5, 2017 at 10:49 pm #67009wvParticipantApril 6, 2017 at 10:28 am #67021
Billy_TParticipantThanks for the video by Wolff. He’s always good. Pretty much everything he says is just common sense, IMO. But America has been so brainwashed for so long, it doesn’t even get that we would all be better off under actual socialism, the real thing, the fully democratic, egalitarian, cooperative, decentralized vision which was its mainstream prior to the Soviet Union. Libertarian Socialist, basically.
Was fantasizing the other day if I were to be president and could fill out my own cabinet and staff advisors, etc. etc. Wolff would be one of the people I’d ask right off the bat to join the team. Chomsky, David Harvey, Yanis Varoufakis, Thomas Piketty, Robert Brenner, John Bellamy Foster, Naomi Klein. Perhaps a coupla more mainstream folks like Stiglitz and John Quiggin.
I’d also ask them for recommendations on the best Marxian economists, the best leftist consumer, environmental, labor and education activists, both in terms of operations and PR. I’d make sure I staffed the new administration with the best and the brightest, keep it highly diverse — going well beyond my not-so-diverse list above — with no connections to Wall Street and Big Business. I’d draw primarily from leftist activist circles, Academe, the working class, etc. Lots from the working class.
In short, I’d go where no administration has ever gone before, like a leftist Starship Captain Kirk.
;>)
April 6, 2017 at 10:33 am #67024wvParticipantJust looking at the US PRIMARIES — most citizens voted for Rubio, Cruz, Hillary, Trump, etc — but what percentage out of all that, voted for Bernie? In the primaries.
Cause whatever number that is,
is the scorecard right now. Thats where were at.w
vApril 6, 2017 at 11:03 am #67030Billy_TParticipantJust looking at the US PRIMARIES — most citizens voted for Rubio, Cruz, Hillary, Trump, etc — but what percentage out of all that, voted for Bernie? In the primaries.
Cause whatever number that is,
is the scorecard right now. Thats where were at.w
vI have no idea what that percentage is. But I do have this crazy faith that if Americans were actually exposed to true leftist thought, directly, not second or third hand . . . the numbers of people who voted for Sanders would be joined by millions of people who actually would like something even further to his left. He was, after all, pushing for FDR-like policies, updated for 2017, and not something truly “radical” at all. He wasn’t even going as far as “Social Democracy” a la Scandinavia, which involves a stronger support for the public sector than he espoused. Though, this may be because he didn’t think he could discuss it. Not sure. Perhaps he actually does want to go further, but was being careful about that.
Regardless, I think Americans would be open to getting a much better “deal” on things, and the only way that’s going to happen is if we increase the role of the public sector, add more non-profit public goods and services, rather than continuing the policy of privatization. The more things we privatize and turn over to “market forces”, the more people lose and the worse any “deal” becomes for the vast majority.
I think Sanders just started the conversation. We need to go beyond him. Next step, IMO, would be for America to get a good look at Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land. And we build from there.
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